Therapeutic cultivation : errors and its reformation : an address delivered to the Tennessee Medical Society, April 7, 1857 / by E. B. Haskins.

  • Haskins, E. B. (Edward Branch), -1868.
Date:
1857
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Therapeutic cultivation : errors and its reformation : an address delivered to the Tennessee Medical Society, April 7, 1857 / by E. B. Haskins. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the National Library of Medicine (U.S.), through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the National Library of Medicine (U.S.)

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    however, and I may say they constitute a majority of the great minds now successfully laboring in the field of practical medi- cine, who believe that our principles of practice are more rational than they once were; who believe that as the practi- tioner becomes more intimately acquainted with special and general anatomy, physiology, pathology, semiology, and the peculiar action of remedies, that he will gradually enlarge the domain of general therapeutics. In other words, that as the laws of vitality become better understood, under the influences of health and disease, and the action of remedial and prophy- lactic agents, our practice will become more and more rational. With this temperate and laudable hope for the ultimate success of medicine as a rational art, there is no longer any reason why this subject should distract and divide the medical mind; and indeed it would cease to do so, but there are those on the other hand who keep up a continued fire against what they term the rational system; who declare themselvespar^a??,'; to the school of empiricism; who assert that there can be no rational rules in therapeutics; who say they can give no other reason for using a particular remedy than that it has cured a disease similar to the one under treatment. In short, who affirm that all treatment in whole and in detail, must be based upon anterior clinical experience. The contracted and exclusive doctrines of this school, in my humble judgment, is calculated greatly to retard the progress of therapeutics; audit is this consideration which I trust will plead my apology for stopping to examine on this occasion some of the chief arguments used to establish them. I have a double object in this examination: first, to show the evils of the system itself; secondly, to show the evils of partyism in medicine— that how minds qualified by nature and by education for the higher pursuits of philosophy, may be seduced into false and illogical reasoning by the deceptive influences of partisan bias. I shall notice the arguments of only two of those champions of empiricism, they being the more generally circulated and read in this country. They both claim to settle the point definitely.- I allude to the French medical historian, M. Kenouard, and our distinguished countryman, the late Professor Bartlett. M. Renouard in an appendix to his able History of Medicine,